[PDX.rb] podcast from last night

[Chris Dawson]

So, the podcast capture did not work perfectly well last night.  The mic I purchased the day before the event died about ten minutes into it, either due to a bad battery or otherwise.  Perhaps buying a mic that is half the cost of a Sony was not smart.  My intention was to setup the box on an IP accessible from the WiFI and bring up an audio player with a graphical equalizer for monitoring, but this could not be arranged last night.  It worked for ten minutes and then the mic just crapped out.  In the future the process will be: turn on mic, test levels by listening to the live stream coming from the box, and then monitor levels during the presentation; this time I only tested at the beginning because that required going back and forth into another room where I could jack my laptop into the same router as the box was on.

The sound quality for the first ten minutes was good, though I suppose that is like saying the first part of the Titanic voyage was absolutely divine.  Regardless, hopefully people are convinced that this is the right process to create podcasts:  check audio levels by connecting to the live stream coming from the box, plug in the USB key, and when you unplug the key, the entire podcast is automatically published into pdxrb.podasp.com.  Production issues are always going to occur when you do an event like this, especially when there is little setup time, so minimizing the potential for human error is important, and I think this process is the best to remove those types of errors.

Although this was not the best showcase event, if you think this would be helpful to other user groups who utilize the FreeGeek areas, can you please cross post this email and let them know that this podcasting box is available?  I intend to help out by being onsite until the process is rock solid, but I am only involved with PDX.pm and PDX.rb, so someone who is lurking here and on PDX.php, or another group, please let them or me know so we can coordinate.  Or, if you are lurking from another city and perhaps interested getting a podcasting appliance setup for your group, I can definitely help with that.  It is just an Ubuntu installation with our software package dropped on it, and I'd be happy to get that process moving if you have a box that someone can donate (500 MHz+ is acceptable).  Here is a little video (1.5 min) of the podcast operation (http://podcast.webcastinabox.com/ug.mov), if anyone cares to check it out.  I think you'll see it is really easy to operate.  Here is a link to a sample metadata.xml file:  http://podcast.webcastinabox.com/metadata.xml

Also, it would be great to have someone do something cool with the CSS on the http://pdxrb.podasp.com site.  Thanks go out to Lennon for telling me how to fix the CSS image issue, but it would be really great to have someone really put up a slick site design.  I suppose we could say that about the PDX.rb main site as well, though....  :)

Thanks,
Chris

_______________________________________________
PDXRuby mailing list
PDXRuby@lists.pdxruby.org
IRC: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net
http://lists.pdxruby.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxruby